Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (12 page)

Islam as a fundamentally political as well as religious development was an organizational and ideological innovation, through which Arab society adapted to the new political and military realities and opportunities—a way in which the Arabs were able to more efficiently take advantage of the weakness of the Roman Empire and Persia. Muhammad’s teachings created a situation in which it was not just expedient but also ideologically desirable to attack the two weakened superpowers.

“God says, ‘My righteous servant shall inherit the earth’; now this is your inheritance and what your Lord has promised you,” Muslim commanders told their troops on the eve of the conquest of the Persian Empire. In the event of a Muslim victory, the enemy’s “property, their women, their children and their country will be yours.”

The defeated Persian general was informed by the victorious Arab commander that God had “sent a prophet from among [the Arabs] and one of his promises was that we should conquer and overcome these lands.”
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According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad informed both the Roman and Persian imperial authorities (probably via their frontier governors) of the teachings of Islam—but they took no notice. In fact, his envoy to the Romans was seized and executed. Both empires were no doubt seen by early Muslims as rejecting the word of God and so laying themselves open to conquest.

A chapter of the Koran known as “The Spoils of War” makes it abundantly clear how Islam would aid the process of victory. This text uses as its lesson the experiences of the children of Israel in their conflict with Egypt at the time of the exodus, prior to the conquest of the promised land. The way of the nonbelievers is like “the way of Pharaoh’s folk … They disbelieved the revelations of Allah and Allah took [destroyed] them for their sins. Lo! Allah is strong, severe in punishment.”
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The nonbeliever’s way is “as the way of Pharaoh’s folk; they denied the revelation of their Lord, so We destroyed them for their sins. And We drowned the folk of Pharaoh. All were evil-doers,” says verse 54 of “The Spoils of War”—a surah dating from around the time of Islam’s first great battle, that of Badr against the nonbelieving Meccans in 624. “Lo. The worst of beasts in Allah’s sight are the ungrateful who will not believe.”
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The surah adds, “Oh Prophet! Exhort the believers to fight. If there be of you 20 steadfast, they shall overcome 200, and if there be of you a hundred steadfast, they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve because the disbelievers are a people without intelligence.”
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The ideology of Islam matched exactly what was required by the Medinans in order to conquer the Arabian Peninsula and then for the Arabs as a whole to exploit the exhausted and weakened state of the Roman and Persian empires.

The new ideology raised the normal antagonism felt toward an enemy to an altogether higher level. Instead of conquest and victory being seen in purely material and political terms, Islam allowed them also to be seen in terms of destiny and religious duty.

“When thy Lord inspired the angels, saying ‘I am with you,’ so make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite [their] necks and smite of them each finger.

“That is because they opposed Allah and his Messenger [Muhammad]. Whosoever opposeth Allah and his Messenger [for him] lo, Allah is severe in punishment.”
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“Oh ye who believe! When ye meet those who disbelieve in battle, turn not your backs to them,” says a passage in “The Spoils of War” referring to the religious need for determination and courage.
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“Whosoever on that day turneth his back to them, unless manoeuvring for battle or intent to join a company, he truly hath incurred wrath from Allah, and his habitation will be Hell, a hapless journey’s end.”
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In a sense, even the killing in battle of a nonbelieving enemy was seen as the work of God.

“Ye [Muslims] slew them not, but Allah slew them. And thou [Muhammad] threwest not when thou didst throw, but Allah threw,” says verse 17 of surah 8, written at the time of the Battle of Badr.

Even the taking of prisoners was divinely discouraged in some circumstances. “It is not for any prophet to have captives before he hath made slaughter in the land.”
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Again there are parallels with what the Old Testament relates as the events surrounding the Jewish exodus from Egypt. In early ancient Israel, the concept of holy war existed, inasmuch as fighting for God was seen as a sacred activity. The Book of Joshua (chapter 6, verses 18–24) provides a gruesome example, the capture of Jericho, in which all living things—men, women, children, and animals—had to be put to death and all buildings and property had to be burned as an act of ritual destruction.

In Arabia in the 620s, Muhammad’s ability to survive as a radical politico-religious leader depended on military success. In order to succeed, he had to keep expanding. He had to keep on delivering success to his followers—and to would-be followers.

“If we give allegiance to you and God gives you victory over your opponents, will we have authority after you?” one hopeful Arab tribal leader with an eye to the future is said to have asked Muhammad.
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Furthermore, Arab tribal society was very warlike and always had been: “How many a Lord and Mighty Chief have our horses trampled underfoot … we march forth to war,” wrote a pre-Islamic poet, glorifying conflict.
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“When I thrust in my sword it bends almost double. I kill my opponent with a sharp mashrafi
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sword, and I yearn for death like a camel over-full with milk,” wrote one of his Islamic successors.
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T
he conquest of nonbelievers was thus seen as a fundamentally good thing in terms of political survival, tribal tradition, and religious obligation. As one prominent historian of early Islam, Patricia Crone, put it, “Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer and his deity told him to conquer.”
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I S L A M I C
C O N Q U E S T S

T
he Muslim advance was one of the most rapid in human history. Indeed, as we have seen, medieval Arab historians likened the swift progress of early Islam to the conquests of Alexander the Great a thousand years earlier. In one illuminated manuscript,
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Alexander is seen as a sort of proto-Islamic precursor of Muhammad—and is pictured actually standing beside Islam’s most holy place, the Kaba in Mecca.
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The first clash between Muslim and Roman forces (the Battle of Mu’ta) took place in 629 in the political and military vacuum that existed immediately after the Persian withdrawal (628) and the proper reestablishment of Roman rule. Although the Romans were victorious, their success did not stop four Roman-controlled Arab towns (Aqaba, Jarba, Adhruh, and Ma’an) from defecting a year later to the newly emerging Muslim power. In the Roman authorities’ determination to prevent such civil defections, the governor of one of these towns, Ma’an, was promptly arrested and executed.

For a few years Islam bided its time and built up its army. Then in 633, the year after Muhammad died, Muslim forces invaded both the Persian and Roman empires and scored notable successes—at the Battle of the River of Blood, against Persia, and at the battles of Dathin, Ajnadayn, and Fahl, against the Romans. Islamic forces even temporarily captured Damascus and Hims.

Smarting from defeat, the emperor ordered a counterattack. Damascus came once again into Roman hands, but its local Roman chief administrator, Mansur, who was an ethnic Arab, refused to cooperate with the Roman military and withheld vital provisions.
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The Roman army, fifteen thousand to twenty thousand strong—its leadership divided between mutually suspicious generals—then collided with the Islamic forces eighty miles south of Damascus at Jabiya-Yarmuk.

The battle—or, more accurately, a series of clashes culminating in a large battle—lasted some one and a half months. Much of the local population, including important local Jewish communities, was either indifferent or hostile to the Roman cause. And as described above, the Roman forces were riven with discord.

In the end, it seems to have been a Muslim night attack, which took advantage of poor Roman discipline, command, and control, that turned the tide. In the dawn conflict that followed, the Romans were utterly annihilated. Thousands were killed in battle. Many of those who were not killed in the battle, their morale at rock bottom, simply sat down and tried to surrender, but they were slaughtered where they sat, for the Muslims were taking no prisoners. Those who escaped were pursued relentlessly. One group of fleeing soldiers was said to have been chased for five hundred miles!

Jabiya-Yarmuk ranks among the most important battles in world history. After the defeat, Roman power in the Middle East virtually collapsed, and most of Syria and Palestine fell to Islam almost immediately. Jerusalem was captured and would remain in Muslim hands for most of the subsequent thirteen and a half centuries. Gaza was stormed and its garrison members were executed by the Muslim army—then declared martyrs by the Church at the insistence of the emperor.
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Muslim soldiers swept to victory at the Battle of Qadisiya, not far from what is now the southern Iraqi town of Al Hammam. Most of what is now Iraq (then the western part of the Persian Empire) fell to Islam. The spectacular and bejeweled Persian capital, Ctesiphon (twenty miles southeast of modern Baghdad), was sacked and occupied.

In 639 more Roman towns (Caesarea and Ascalon) were captured, and in 640 the expanding Islamic armies invaded Egypt, Armenia, and the beleaguered Persian Empire’s heartland, highland Persia itself. Persia fell at the Battle of Nehavend, known in Arab tradition as the “Victory of Victories.”

Two years later, in 642, Islamic armies completed the conquest of Egypt, thus robbing the Roman Empire of at least half its remaining wealth and its main source of grain. The Muslim conquerors then invaded and occupied Cyrenaica (modern Libya).

By 652 the Islamic empire had reached the borders of India. In 653 an Islamic navy seized Roman Cyprus, and by 670 the Roman capital, Constantinople, itself was under siege, though the Muslim army never broke through. Indeed, Muhammad’s former standard-bearer—by then a rather aged warrior—died of illness in that abortive campaign and was buried outside the city walls.

In the west, Islamic armies pushed on, ending the Roman Empire’s nine-hundred-year control of North Africa in a seven-year campaign between 698 and 705, and then invaded southern Europe, conquering most of Spain in 711 and penetrating deep (though temporarily) into France between 718 and 732.

Over subsequent centuries, Islam was to spread across the Sahara to West Africa, along the East African coast as far as Mozambique, and east to western China, India, Indonesia, and even the Philippines. Today it is one of the world’s three largest religions, has five hundred million followers, and is a major player on the world geopolitical stage. Yet its emergence 1,400 years ago—like so many other aspects of the modern world—owed much to the political, economic, epidemiological, and religious factors that flowed from the climatic chaos of the mid–sixth century.

B E H I N D  T H E 
R O M A N  C O L L A P S E

T
he reasons for the partial disintegration of the Roman Empire in the seventh century were legion, but each of them stemmed from one or more of five sometimes interrelated historical problems: a chronic lack of cash; the Avar/Slav seizure of the Balkans; the Persian occupation; the plague; and religious dissension. Ultimately, those five problems had grown either directly or indirectly, wholly or partially, out of the climatic problems of a century earlier.

Some of the complex factors (specifically the plague and the Avars) that led to the empire’s dire financial problems have been described in Chapter 7, but the way in which lack of cash translated into military disaster in the seventh century was equally complex and almost fatal.